Lowered Clock Speeds??

Koronium

Reputable
Sep 30, 2015
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Hey guys. Hope you are doing swell.

I made an account on TH just because this has become a serious problem.

I upgraded my PC last Christmas, which included upgrading to an EVGA GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0 and an AMD FX 8350. I bought a 256GB Crucial BX100 SSD about a month ago. It's been a while now, but today I decided to install Windows 10 because it sounds like a great OS since all of my friends were telling me about it.

So I installed it, activated it, etc. And checked task manager to manage startup services and programs and saw in the performance tab that my 8GB Corsair Vengeance was running at 1333 MHz instead of 1600 as advertised. Strange. Not only that, but my CPU was running at 2.8 GHz. Wtf? I thought 4 GHz was stock. Ok. So I searched up how to fix this and it said to boot into BIOS and to change the clock multiplier settings. Changed RAM to 1600 MHz and the CPU to 4.0 GHz. Originally the settings were both set to [Auto], which adjusted it to those speeds.

Tried booting into Windows, got a blue screen. It said something along the lines of IRQL Not_Equal or something like that. Uh oh. Not good. So I tried researching this problem and from what I read on this forum it says it's a driver problem. ~But I did a fresh install of Windows 10 with the latest Geforce Drivers...?

So I lowered the RAM clock speed back to 1333 MHz and the CPU down to 3.5 GHz. Works well as of right now, but I feel like this is gonna kick me in the ass when I'm playing resource intensive games. How can I restore my hardware back to normal clock speeds without messing anything up? I've never had this problem before.
 
Solution

You got boot errors that were solved by lowering memory speed, you should definitely consider the RAM and test it out.



According to you it worked on the current hardware until Windows 10, so it's less likely that it's hardware incompatibility, but certainly can be hardware failure.

You should also test older graphics driver versions just in case.
For RAM, DDR3 should return to 1333MHz (actually 667 DDR) if there is a problem, since that's the fastest certifiable speed for DDR3. Likewise, the CPU will likely idle at a much lower speed than it's max speed, and unless you have resource intensive applications running it will not likely hit max speed for any reasonable amount of time.


Now, for your error, it seems that your RAM is starting to die, especially if it had been running at 1.65V rather than 1.5V. You should try running with only one stick (at the rated speed) and then alternating. If only one causes the issue, you know which is the one that's dying.
 


I don't think my RAM is dying. Could my motherboard be an issue? it's a Gigabyte 78LMT-S2P Mini ITX board. and I got it back in 2012 or 2013. Could it be that the newer hardware doesn't work on old mobos? Or at least fully work?
 

You got boot errors that were solved by lowering memory speed, you should definitely consider the RAM and test it out.



According to you it worked on the current hardware until Windows 10, so it's less likely that it's hardware incompatibility, but certainly can be hardware failure.

You should also test older graphics driver versions just in case.
 
Solution